The Arctic night was fracturing.
Elaine dragged the Ancient Engineer through collapsing ice tunnels, her body 92% crystalline. Her left eye no longer saw the physical world—only quantum-entangled gene strands forming a colossal double helix above the Mid-Atlantic, where seven Arks' energy beams converged.
"How long?" Her voice grated like ice shards.
The Engineer's pearlescent scales dimmed. "Conversion completes at first dawn light." He pointed to the jellyfish colony pulsing in Elaine's chest. "Your bioclock shows 1 hour, 47 minutes."
The tunnel convulsed. Black liquid oozed through cracks—not oil, but military-grade genetic dissolver. The Engineer yanked Elaine aside as his scales sizzled upon contact.
"They're erasing evidence..." Fluorescent blood sprayed from his gills. "...including you, their failed experiment."
Elaine's retinas suddenly accessed military feeds. Blurry footage showed her parents 99.3% merged with the Ark core, their skulls protruding from crystal, mouths shaping the same silent words:
SING THE REVERSE LULLABY
The Engineer seized her wrist: "They're still conscious! But every second risks the plague's escape!"
The tunnel opened abruptly. They surfaced to a surreal pre-dawn vista: the midnight sun hung like a bloodied wheel, staining the ice plain orange. Beyond, the Mid-Atlantic Ark's energy beam had solidified into a blue titan tree linking sea and sky.
The Engineer extracted a pure crystal from his chest: "The reversal vector. But it requires Harper blood as catalyst..."
As Elaine took it, Qi's figure flickered within the aurora—not a hallucination, but a quantum projection through military satellites. His final message pulsed in Morse code across the sky:
· — · · · — · (REMNANT)
— · · — · (TRUST)
The Engineer suddenly convulsed. Elaine's quantum vision revealed the horror: plague genes lurked within him too. The "pure" crystal was a decoy.
"You're another vessel?" She recoiled.
"No..." His pupils dilated. "I'm the last antibody..."
Ice exploded. The tentacled woman's submarine breached, her body now 95% crystal, her head fully bloomed into six petal-like jaws—each embedded with a human face. Two were Elaine's parents' distorted visages.
"Join Ascension..." A thousand mouths spoke. "...or witness mankind's end."
Elaine stared at the crystal. The reversal required sacrifice, and Qi's projection pointed where the midnight sun's reflection hit the ice—creating a natural laser to broadcast her genetic code globally.
She began to sing.
Not her grandmother's lullaby.
But her own song of annihilation.